Colorfront supports HDR, UHD, partners again with AJA

Colorfront released new products and updated current product support as part of NAB 2018, expanding their partnership with AJA. Both companies had demos of the new HDR Image Analyzer for UHD, HDR and WCG analysis. It can handle 4K, HDR and 60fps in realtime and shows information in various view modes including parade, pixel picker, color gamut and audio.

Other software updates include support for new cameras in On-Set Dailies and Express Dailies, as well as the inclusion of HDR analysis tools. QC Player and Transkoder 2018 were also released, with the latter now optimized for HDR and UHD.

Colorfront also demonstrated its tone-mapping capabilities (SDR/HDR) right in the Transkoder software, without the FS-HDR hardware (which is meant more for broadcast). Static (one light) or dynamic (per shot) mapping is available in either direction. Customization is available for different color gamuts, as well as peak brightness on a sliding scale, so it’s not limited to a pre-set LUT. Even just the static mapping for SDR-to-HDR looked great, with mostly faithful color reproduction.

The only issues were some slight hue shifts from blue to green, and clipping in some of the highlights in the HDR version, despite detail being available in the original SDR. Overall, it’s an impressive system that can save time and money for low-budget films when there isn’t the budget to hire a colorist to do a second pass.